Good news for the city climate: as a new study shows, your environment cools your environment, even at extreme temperatures of more than 39 degrees Celsius. This refutes earlier assumptions that the cooling function of trees has reached limits at 30 to 35 degrees.
Trees cool their environment in cities by evaporating water over their leaves. This process works as sweating: evaporation robs the environment, which lowers the air temperature. If the leaf temperatures rise above 30 to 35 degrees Celsius, the photosynthesis no longer works – the leaf pores to prevent water loss.
The research team of the Federal Research Institute Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL) and the Federal Technical University in Lausanne (EPFL) measured in the summer of 2023 how aircraft trees behave under heat stress.
Connections are not yet fully decoded
The measurements on eight trees in the suburb of Lausanner of Lancy showed that the water flow in the tribes did not even decrease in high heat – on the contrary: with increasing temperatures, evaporation even increased. “Of course we have not yet fully understood how trees react to extreme circumstances,” is student director Christoph Bachofen quoted. The researchers suspect that, among other things, deep water reserves in the ground have helped aircraft trees.
The actual cooling effect of city trees, while heat waves can be considerably underestimated by current predictions with common models, the study, which was published in the magazine “Urban Forestry & Urban Greening”. Now it is important to find out which tree species cool down particularly well.
Source: Krone
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